Children’s developing understanding that even reliable sources need to verify their claims

Abstract

In a society inundated with information, fostering empirical habits of mind in young children is critically important. Perhaps the most fundamental epistemic principle is that claims, no matter who is making them, must be supported by sufficient evidence. Building on past research on young children’s selective social learning, three experiments with 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 136) investigated when children come to understand this central principle. The results suggest clear age differences: By age 4, children consistently selected an individual who verified their claims over one who did not and by age 6, children were able to do so even if that act of verification conflicted with that individual’s past history of reliability. Further, with age, children’s ability to explicitly justify those choices in terms of informants’ epistemic practices improved dramatically. Overall, this work presents an important next step in investigating children’s developing understanding of the process by which evidence supports epistemic claims.